The all-new Toyota Prius – silence of the lanes

Green cars have been branded overpriced, sluggish and ugly. Today, the most famous eco-car, the Toyota Prius, enters its third generation. Will the cleaner hybrid tempt buyers? Novelist Toby Litt took a test drive

I drove it down to Brighton, because it seemed a very Brighton sort of car – a hybrid vehicle for a transition town. I was expecting it to receive admiration, affirmation, perhaps even sly congratulation. But did it get envying sideways looks from cyclists? Thumbs up from Green activists? Tranced out nods from dog-on-string trustafarians?

No, not really. In fact, it was much better at passing unnoticed, particularly at passing unheard. When running only on its self-recharging battery, the thing is virtually soundless. (I usually drive a P-reg Audi A4, the cassette-player in which – when rewinding – is louder than the Prius.)

And so, while trailing a bearded, grey-haired man for about a minute down one of Brighton's narrow lanes – him in the middle of the road and blithely unaware of the 5-door hatchback breathing down his neck – I had a realisation: the Prius might just be the best car ever for playing What's the Time, Mr Wolf?

Once I realised this, there was a great temptation to spend the next half-hour sneaking up on crusties and giving them a friendly bump in the tattooed calves. But this would, of course, be foolish, dangerous and, most of all mischievous. And there's not a smidgeon of any of these qualities about the Prius. It's sensible, safe and – you might almost say – puritanical. This is a car that doesn't just go, it also makes a stand. Driving it made me feel slightly chastened, as if I had my old RE teacher in the back seat.

Over and above a fuel-saving "Eco Mode", you can put the Prius into EV (Electric Vehicle) Mode, where it stops being hybrid and runs entirely on its battery. This only lasts for a couple of miles before it reverts to mere Eco, but if you do anything even mildly aggressive – get up to entry velocity on a busy roundabout, say – the display will, more in sadness than anger, tell you" "EV Mode has been turned off due to excessive speed."

I was almost surprised it didn't follow this up with, "Hey, compadre, why don't you just take a chill pill?" When I first turned the radio on, it had been set to Smooth FM. The advice sheet on "better driving" in the glove compartment perplexingly but characteristically read: "When driving at high speed, drive at a moderate and constant speed." Okay, I get the point.

But it is this very moderation that is the Prius's unique selling point. The car gently forces you to drive in an environmentally responsible way, and that means you don't have to feel so guilty about the fact you are transporting yourself to buy a pack of decaf tea from Tesco's in three tonnes of hi-tech metal. And products like this, ones we buy knowing they will gently force us to mend our ecocidal ways, are being marketed as the future – the future that tries to preserve the future of the future.

Although its looks are distinctive (a bit like a snowglobe-on-wheels that's been semi-flattened, aerodynamicised and had an aerofoil added on the back), the Toyota Prius isn't as much a statement here as in the US.

There, the "Pious Prius" has become a symbol of white-collar eco-smugness. You can join the Facebook group "I hate the Toyota Prius, and the liberal tree-huggers that drive them!" You can laugh at parody advertisements – one of which shows a man dragging a bagged up, weighed down corpse from the car's trunk towards a lake above the slogan, "Well, at least he drives a Prius." In California, it seems, you can attack them with rocks or by ramming them with less fuel-efficient cars, with impunity.

All of which seems to show how threatened some people feel by anything that appears unthreatening.

With more than 1m units sold, the Prius really is silently creeping up on American – and world – car culture.

It is, whisper it, a very sensible vehicle. A lot of intelligence has gone into its design. For example, the mph and SatNav arrows are displayed, by reflection, in the lower part of the driver's side windscreen – in plain view but not obtrusive. The question it poses, though, is whether sensible, unobtrusive, intelligent measures can save us as we plunge down the steep slope the other side of peak oil. As for me, I've seen the future, and it walks.